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| Annemarie in Morocco |
May 23 was the anniversary of Annemarie Schwarzenbach’s birth. She was born 113 years ago. That number equates to the planet Mercury, ruler of her Sun sign, Gemini. Mercury is the communicator par excellence, the player with words, the traveller between worlds. Annemarie was nothing if not a communicator. She wrote hundreds of articles, many short stories and several novels. All this by the age of 34. She explored all kinds of different worlds – physical territories (in then little explored places such as Iran, Afghanistan and the Congo) and the metaphysical regions of consciousness.
I was drawn to her work many years ago. For the past few years my life became entwined with hers as I lived a parallel existence in the 1930s and ’40s in her company, researching and writing The Buoyancy of the Craft. This felt like a book that just had to be written. That sense of devoir (a Saturnian mixture of duty, necessity, commitment, and immersion in the task) has lifted now. Annemarie has not gone away but rather, our relationship has changed. I’m writing about her with a new lightness, where there’s room for expansion, for experiment and enjoyment.
Every writer it seems, who decides to write about a real person, whether living or dead, has their own take on the motivation and ethics of this. Ajay Close is author of several novels, and her most recent is What we did in the Dark, a fictional account of the writer Catherine Carswell’s first marriage, and a splendid and engrossing read. Her article about the writing of this novel can be read in The Bottle Imp.
Another book which I devoured is Jen Shapland’s My Autobiography of Carson McCullers. You can see from the title what her take is and I found the mixture of writing – about Jen’s own life and about Carson’s life, quite fascinating. It throws up for question the relationship of the writer to the human being one is writing about. Jen writes “This book takes place in the fluid distance between the writer and her subject” a distance I consciously wanted, when writing about Annemarie, to eliminate as much as possible.
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| Annemarie and Klaus Mann |
When I was only a short way into the writing of my own book, and people asked me what kind of book it was I was writing, I found it hard to answer. I didn’t want it to be a biography at least not the kind of biographies I had read. All praise to the people who can write objectively about their subject but that was not what I wanted to do. I wanted to in some sense, as much as one can, become her, as well as exercise the kind of imagination that she did, when encountering other people who interested her, who intrigued her, who aroused her deep feelings.
At the same time I wanted to map the precise itinerary of her life, both literally (in terms of places and people) and metaphorically, in terms of the evolution of her ideas, values, goals and perceptions. So The Buoyancy of the Craft is a hybrid mixture of fact and imagination. Annemarie said in an interview that she wanted to ‘touch people’s hearts’ with her writing.
She did this with her writing, just as she did, in her life. Nearly 80 years on from her death, several books have been written about her, both biographies, and novels based on her life. The Buoyancy of the Craft is the first to be written in English.
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